How to build a product roadmap

An attempt to solve this product manager’s puzzle.

Spreadsheets, GANTT diagrams, Trello boards: The struggle is real.

Over the past 7 years, through several product management roles & freelance projects, I’ve learnt a lot in terms of building product roadmaps. This is one of the most challenging exercises you can be faced as a product manager. Because you have to make sacrifices. And because you’re faced with a lot of pressure, whether it be internally, from other teams, or externally, from your users.

In this post, I’ll try to give a few tips I’ve gathered from my own experience and from product teams working for inspiring companies like Intercom, Basecamp, Front and Slack.

What is a product roadmap?

A product roadmap is the exercise of turning a messy list of projects into a prioritized, visual summary of the product team’s priorities for the next weeks/months/years. It enables the product team to plan and communicate their view of the future that they have for the product.

There are 2 key elements in building a product roadmap:

1. Prioritizing projects
2. Visually communicating the roadmap.

Prioritizing projects

Cost / benefit = ROI

There’s only so much a product & engineering team can achieve within a fixed period of time. Not everything can be done. That’s why projects need to be prioritized. How? The basic method is to assess the cost and benefit of each project.

By doing so, you can deduct the ROI (Return on investment) of each project turn an unordered list into an ordered list.

Source: Ruthless Prioritization by The Black Box of Product Management

But this remains very conceptual. “Time to build” can easily be measured if you have basic wireframes of your solution and show it to your engineering team. But how can you scientifically measure the customer value?

Value for the company, value for the customers

In reality, “Customer value” is often a mix between “Value for the company” and “Value for its…